Enacting Identities: An Ethnography of a Job Training Program

Abstract In this article, we explore "identity enactment" within the context of a job training program that pushed its adult students to adopt certain work-related identities. Drawing on analyses of long-term participant observations, longitudinal interviews, and written artifacts, we reveal the tensions, adjustments, and reorientations that occurred when adults' conceptions of their current and future identities collided with different, even disparate, models of the professional people they were asked to become. This research reveals job training as a prime context for identity construction and speaks to the complicated relationship of identity formation to skills development. It also provides a set of terms for analyzing such identity work, conceptual categories developed from our reading of sociocultural theoretical perspectives on identity formation, ethnographies of personhood, and our ethnographic data. These terms—enacted identities, mediational means, performative moments, and reorientations of self—comprise a useful heuristic for fine-grained examinations of the process of identity formation. Notes All names of organizations and individuals are pseudonyms. For a discussion of the need to conduct interdisciplinary research in order to address complex real world issues, as well as suggestions for how the academy can foster such research, see the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Science Engineering and Public Policy (2004). For examples of research on work from an interdisciplinary perspective, see Rose (2001, 2005). Although each finding' section foregrounds one of the four terms, this is only an organizational scheme for the sake of presentational clarity and does not imply linearity or a separation of the concepts. Identity enactment of necessity employs mediational means, as do reorientations of self, while both can occur during performative moments. Although DuMario and the others were together for this first introductory class, after this, DuMario joined another class, and although we followed his fortunes, we did not focus on him in the rest of the study.